“Greed,” Gordon Gekko once declared, “is good.” Oliver Stone’s private-equity titan was referring to the process of creative destruction, in which ravenous corporate raiders strip a businesses to its bones in three months flat. Venture capitalists have the same simple attitude toward growth: growth is good. Their fish of choice is not a piranha but… Read More
Catherine Rampell at the New York Times today reports that “state colleges in Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Florida and Texas have eliminated entire engineering and computer science departments” due to budget cuts. How are we doing in Washington state? Well, consider a few facts about the University of Washington’s computer science department: The department… Read More
There has been plenty of talk lately, from Phil Sugar and Ben Horowitz and from me too, about how you have to be a different leader at different stages of a company’s growth. This is almost entirely true. But a tiny, important part of it is a crock. What I notice about the greatest companies,… Read More
Redfin is now the top-rated real estate application on every major mobile device. This is an objective fact for Android, where Redfin stands clearly above the competition and it is true for iPhone and iPad too, where Redfin’s cumulative rating is higher than any other application’s. Cumulative Scores iPhone only iPad Only iPhone & iPad… Read More
Only six month months ago, we compared photos of a home before & after foreclosure. Here are the shiny SUV, the boat, the second car, the crazy topiary, the pink flamingo, the Virgin Mary statue, circa 2008: And here is how bare it looked like summer: Now after an investor bought the house just six… Read More
The great venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote last night about how the investors in his own startup once told him they wanted a real CEO. What struck me about the essay, which was mostly about how Andressen Horowitz helps founding entrepreneurs develop into great leaders, was Ben’s striking response to the insult: he acknowledged the… Read More
Just before I joined Redfin, I’d wanted to start a company but my brother got sick and I fell in love and soon I was in Seattle. What I never forgot was the lawyer who was going to help us incorporate that business, Ilan Lovinsky, a partner at Gunderson Dettmer, and brother of the great… Read More
Well, now I feel silly. Earlier this evening, I wrote a blog post about the boycott against the pro-SOPA crowd; SOPA is the bill to stop piracy on the Internet. I said that the boycott was a form of censorship when in fact a boycott is an exercise in free speech. I was 100% wrong,… Read More
UPDATE: I was wrong in this post in saying that a boycott stifles free speech. A boycott is a form of free speech. I retracted that argument in a subsequent post a few hours later. *sigh* The opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the bill before Congress to punish websites that publish pirated… Read More
Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Reid Hoffman, Evan Williams and Dennis Crowley are launching a campaign this Wednesday to stop the Protect IP bill recently introduced in the Senate. They’re some of the smartest people thinking about the Internet today. But sometimes I think they’re part of the problem, not the solution. The bill would make… Read More